Starfox Miles Opus
by Ned 77
Summary: 50 years after the conclusion of the Andross wars, Titania has grown from a desert wasteland into an urban jungle, with a population of billions. Briar Politicus of the PCPD must solve a series of disturbing crimes in the capital, Princeps City.


Starfox ~ Miles Opus

At what point does an individual place the distinction between acceptable society and the outcasts'?

Does that definition not depend in large part on personal circumstances? 

If so, how can acceptable society' be defined if that explanation relies on 

introspective judgement?

Chapter 1: Inductio

"Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Conduct of Life"

Cargo Ship Hangar 7, Princeps City Municipal Spaceport, Princeps City, Titania

Monday 14th June, 11:14pm

Officer Briar Politicus of the Princeps City police department hid behind a crate and reflected on the current situation. To cut a long story short, he was in deep shit.

Briar listened out for his pursuer. It was dark in Hangar 7 of the merchant spaceport, and Briar had an advantage over the man chasing him. Briar, as a lizard, had an incredibly keen sense of smell. He could detect the rank odour of his pursuer from a mile off. Added to that, he could see and taste the heat of the man coming. It was hanging in the air, a tangible field of different thermal levels. It projected the world into the eyes of Briar in a marvellous spectrum of colours. Briar's lizard ancestry had given him the inherent racial abilities of his reptilian ancestors. He could taste and smell all the tiny little differences in heat that were around him, and distinguish many different levels of olfactory and oral sensations. He could also see in thermal vision, using the special pit organs mounted in front of his eyes.

Unfortunately, some sacrifices had to be made. Every species has to have its Achilles heel, as some might say. Lizards didn't have ears, or at least not very developed ones. At some point in his evolution, whatever deity controlled the ways of nature had decided that lizards, being ground based creatures, only needed to hear the vibrations of approaching objects.

All fine and well, as long as said deity doesn't decide that to keep up with the rest of the Lylat system your aforesaid lizard species needs to triple in size and make a foray into the field of bipedal movement. Therefore, whatever advantages gleaned from having your ears less than five centimetres from terra firma are ruined. After all, what's one little evolutionary throwback when given the opportunity to become one of Lylat's ruling species? Surely it can't hurt that much.

Bollocks to evolution, as Briar had once colourfully put it.

Briar's Darwinian reverie was broken by a shift in the field of smell coming from the assailant. It was becoming stronger, much stronger, indicating that the man was moving closer to Briar's position. Briar tasted the air with his tongue, and simultaneously sniffed, inhaling and instantly processing the man's olfactory information.

It appeared that his pursuer was large, much larger than an average person was. Briar would have roughly estimated that he was eight to nine feet tall, and armoured. Briar could taste the tang of metal and oil in the air. Briar's nostril picked up and unusual scent. This man smelled unusually strongly of oil and lubricants, ah, thought Briar, A cyborg. Cyborgs were easy to spot. The smell of unnatural fluids, metal and plastic permeated them all over. Some were so strong the cyborg modifications blotted out the smell of the organic parts. This person was one of them. Briar could only make out the faintest of fleshy smells under the layers of mechanical odour. Crap, this guy's a full borg conversion! Briar realised with a mental jolt.

Full cyborg conversions were the stuff of urban legends. Incredibly rare, they were the ultimate zenith for any of Principal City's many tech head body-replacement nuts. Typically, a full cyborg would be little more than a torso encased in armour, and in extreme cases Briar had heard tell of cyborgs who were little more than electronically sustained brains. Briar dreaded the thought that it would ever happen to him.

Briar sniffed out for the approaching cyborg. The man lumbered along as if he had little care for whether Briar knew where he was or not. It probably didn't matter. Briar could do little to a full borg. Briar looked down into his hand, and at the police issue .45 handgun he carried. His trusty companion for years, it seemed incredibly insignificant now. He'd need at least armour piercing five-five-sixers to take on a monster like the one currently headed in his direction and stand any semblance of a chance.

Briar poked his head slowly round the side of the crate, but not very much. Just enough to get one eye into a position where he could see the hulking cyborg. Briar wasn't taking any chances by exposing any more of himself. Dark it may be, but a full borg was likely to have image enhancement technology like night vision or IR heat detection. If the borg was a combat type, which from the shape of the beast he or she most likely was, it was a certainty. Briar surveyed his opponent carefully, and found that he'd made a misjudgement. Eight or nine feet had been an understatement. This borg was at least eleven, and twice as broad as Briar. It was slightly hunched under the weight of a massive gun. At a glance, Briar would have guessed an exo-armour scale 30mm assault rifle. Even a full borg would have trouble with that, but the one in front of him was making a valiant effort and succeeding, much to Briar's disappointment. Briar focused on the head. It appeared to be a K-16 Enforcer sensor array built onto the front of a fairly standard military full borg head. Definitely night vision equipped.

Briar whipped his head in, and checked the ammo in his pistol. There were sixteen rounds left in it, a full magazine, for what good it would do. Briar felt as if he was doomed. It was time to make a run for it. It would be stupid to stay in one place behind the crate. One blow from that arm could crush him like an insect. It would be like being hit by a fifty mile-an-hour beer keg. 

Briar carefully timed his next move. He quickly calculated exactly the right moment and the exact trajectory to leap from his hiding place and begin running. Of course, like all carefully laid-out plans, it went wrong as soon as he tried to implement it. Briar managed to leap just as the cyborg was facing him, and it raised its gun and put a triplet of bullets through the wall barely millimetres from Briar's head.

Oh great, Briar thought, It's got a bead on me. I'm really screwed now. 

The cyborg broke into a run; it's footsteps pounding the metal flooring of the hangar. Briar swore, and dived for cover behind the landing gear of the cargo ship that the crates he had been cowering behind belonged to. The cyborg followed him underneath the ship, stooping to fit, and opened fire again, the bullets from its gun bouncing around and burrowing holes in the floor and Briar's temporary protective screen. One of the rounds hit a primary support, and the larding gear began to creak and buckle. Briar watched in horror as the leg began to bend sideways in the middle, its integrity destroyed by the removal of one of the primary supports.

Briar's head quickly whipped round, checking the other supports of the ship. There were three in total, and now one had just been irreparably destroyed. Briar's subconscious quickly did the math.

"Oh fuck!" He shouted, scrabbling at the ground and throwing himself clear as the leg gave way and the ship came crashing down on the cyborg. Briar screamed as the very edge of the ship caught him on the leg. He heard a sickening crunch and an intense shooting pain as his leg was crushed. Briar shouted and pulled at the leg, but stopped again, as the pain became so bad he nearly passed out. His vision swam and he fell down momentarily as he became faint from blood loss. He was dimly aware of a warm sensation and an intense smell as his blood poured from the flattened limb. He looked to where the legs were, and his thermal vision picked up a huge white blob where the heat of his blood clouded into the air and pooled on the floor. He tried to free himself again, but it was no good. He was trapped and bleeding to death. Briar's vision clouded, and slowly began to turn black as he fell unconscious again.

Intensive Care Ward 3, Princeps City Municipal Primary Hospital, Princeps City, Titania

Wednesday 16th June, 8:35pm

Briar awoke. He tried to get out of bed, and felt a shooting pain pass through his hips and groin. His nether regions protested at the treatment, and Briar's male instincts made the decision that he would not be going anywhere.

He rested back, and for the first time took a good look around at his surroundings. In his groggy state he had simply assumed that he was home in the disaster zone that could be called his bedroom.

Briar blinked. His surroundings were almost pure white. Everything was painted in a tasteful and very neutral bland colour. Briar quickly dipped into his heat vision, and took a look around the room. No unusual patterns here. The room's temperature signals were fairly normal.

Briar took a more detailed look at the surroundings. There were rows of beds either side of him and across the opposite side of the long straight room. they were full of people, in various states of disrepair. The man opposite him had a bad arm wound, and Briar could see the bloody swab covering what Briar assumed to be a large cut or hole in the outer flesh of his arm. Briar looked down the room at the other invalids arranged in rows. Most of them had fairly minor wounds in the grand scheme of things, lost arms or legs or big holes. Those kinds of wounds could be easily repaired, either by medium level cyborg augmentation, or by the more advanced and more expensive grafted flesh jobs. 

Oh, Briar thought, I'm in hospital. Looks like the intensive care ward. Must be that leg injury. I wonder if it's okay?

Briar looked down at the bed sheets, and two bulges that indicated his legs. That was strange, Briar could have sworn that one of them had been crushed. He reached won to the covers with a clawed finger and thumb, and tentatively adjusted the covers, lifting them just enough to catch a glimpse of his leg. What he saw there gave him the shock of his life. He gave a yelp, and dropped the covers again. He sat back, thumping heavily against the back of the bed. He held his head in his hands. 

No no no!

Briar lifted up the cover again when he was ready to come to terms with the facts again. There was his crushed leg, good as new and in full working condition, with just one problem:

It was made of metal.

Briar's doctor, unable to save the smashed leg with flesh grafting or normal medical techniques, had decided that it would be easier and cheaper all round to simply cut it off and fit a prosthetic mechanical replacement.

Briar looked at his leg. The join onto his body was still quite raw. That must have been the pain he had felt earlier. He examined the leg. Thankfully, it was almost identical to his other leg. Mechanical legs came in all sorts of different shapes and sizes, and were often tailored for different species. The hospital would keep a store of different limbs optimised to best match the performance of the person they were being fitted to. If it was uneven, after that was just a simple matter of making a few adjustments by a technician to match the original dimensions of the amputated limb.

Briar examined it closer. The techs had done quite a good job. The leg was identical to his beloved original, or at least as similar as an armoured servomotor powered mechanical leg could be.

He lay back. What a day. Smuggling, Full borg gunfights, crashing spaceships and now he had a bionic leg. Could the life of Briar Politicus possibly get any worse? Briar doubted it. He was about to proven wrong.

"Politicus!" Came a voice from the other end of the ward. Briar turned his head and picked up the unmistakable smell and heat signature of Chief Garrett. Briar shifted into normal vision to catch a glimpse of the Chief, even though the detail was fairly fuzzy. The huge grizzled old wolf was at the other end of the ward, headed for Briar. Briar swore. Oh Gods, here it comes... He thought, as Garrett continued his thunderous approach down the ward.

Garrett was a career policeman, and years of the stereotypical dunkin' donuts had not done wonders for his figure. He rarely went out on active duty anymore; instead he lurked in his smoky office on the top floor of the main police station, organising the PCPD's daily activities, their budgets and crime priorities. He was undoubtedly the oldest and longest serving member of the PCPD, and many people looked up to him for guidance and advice. Briar didn't. They hated each other. It wasn't normal everyday office animosity; this was true hate of a kind many normal sane people can only imagine. Briar suspected that even in his bed-ridden state, Garrett would almost certainly have something snide to say to Briar. Briar braced himself.

"Politicus, it's good to see you." Garrett said, with what by his usual standards in the presence of Briar was a wide grin. Briar was shocked. This was not the Chief's normal behaviour. Garrett continued. Briar, being virtually deaf, only picked up the slightest tremor of what he was saying, and lip-read the chief's words. Garrett being a wolf, this was harder that normal to achieve, but Briar was an expert, and could tell with a satisfactory deal of accuracy what was going on.

"We all thought you'd had it when that ship fell on you. It's good to see that you're all right. We feared the worst."

All right, that was it. Briar knew that he must have been hallucinating from blood loss or something. He spoke.

"You were worried about me?" He asked Garrett with an almost disbelieving tone of voice. Briar didn't normally speak out loud, except sometimes in heated situations when signing obscenities at people just wouldn't cut it. Another reason because it was hard for him to regulate the volume and tone of his voice, but he was forced to make a special effort with Garrett, because the Chief was the kind of person who just plain couldn't be arsed to learn to speak sign language to converse with Briar.

"Not personally," Garrett replied, "I can't care less what happens to your sorry ass. The rest of the precinct was worried though."

That's better, Briar thought. They were on more familiar ground now. For some strange reason, it actually felt better to know that Garrett hated him than to know that Garrett was concerned for his health. It grounded Briar in reality.

"Didn't think you'd care much sir," Briar said, " Why the personal visit? Surely I'm not that important?"

Garrett thought for a moment before replying to this.

"It's that full borg job a few days ago, the one you were on. We're a bit concerned about it. The smugglers shouldn't have access to combat borgs like that. We think there's an outside agent involve, but we've got absolutely no leads whatsoever."

Briar thought back to the job. He'd been on a routine stakeout mission, waiting for a contingent of illegal arms to come from one of the spaceport's many smuggler crews. They'd received a tip-off from a fairly trusty informant that the deal would be going down that night, and when the smugglers had arrived, Briar had left his hideout to get a closer look, and possibly some more incriminating evidence. From there, it had all gone pear shaped. Briar had observed the deal between the smugglers and a representative of the clients who had appeared to be a Mafia enforcer. A huge crate had been exchanged, and the cash handed over to the pirates. They had then taken their hovercraft and left, and the Mafia man and a few lackeys had begun to load the crate onto the back of a heavy-duty truck for transportation. Briar had got the drop on them, and ended up in a situation with his gun to the back of the head of one of the thugs. Of course, he hadn't reckoned with the Titanian Mafia mentality. If you can't do your job properly, we'll dispose of you. The head Mafia enforcer had shot the lackey, and before Briar could do anything, the others had opened fire.

Briar had been about to enter a gun battle with them, when they all suddenly packed up and made a run for it. Briar had been about to give chase when he'd noticed that one of the thugs had opened the crate. Stopping for a closer inspection, Briar had discovered that none other than a full life-support system had been installed in the crate. Puzzling the information this yielded, Briar had neglected to notice that the full borg, previously contained in the crate, was now on the loose.

A very strange assignment indeed, and one that had ended badly for Briar.

"We've lost all trace of the dealers," Garrett informed him, "And that borg."

"What?" briar asked, surprised, "It got away?"

"Yes. Full combat 'borgs are incredibly tough. It somehow managed to survive that ship falling on it. We've lost the trail."

Briar banged his arm on the bed.

"Damn! And we worked so hard on it."

"I'm here to give you a new assignment, Politicus," Garret said, "We've got a new problem. As you're aware, there's been a recent spike in the number of borg crimes. It's becoming more and more popular, and cheaper and cheaper to get hold of replacement parts for your body. We need an insider in one of the borg gangs."

Briar jumped slightly. Cyborg gangs were reputedly among the most vicious criminals in the city. For a cop to join one would be fairly suicidal. But then again, the majority of cops weren't cyborgs.

"How?"

"We've been doing some surveillance work on the Full Chrome gang for some time now."

"The full borg conversion frat gang?" Briar asked, slightly panicky now.

"Yeah. We think they're involved in that recent Bank robbery down in the third sector. We need someone to spy on them somehow. You're best bet, we think."

Briar knew that Garrett wasn't talking about money when he said bank robbery'. There had been a recent string of robberies to the body banks down in the slums in Sector 3 of the city.

Body banks specialised in the buying and selling of organs and limbs. If anyone needed a transplant or some interesting exotic grafting done, the body bank was the place to go. Within reason, this was legal. Excessive grafters didn't come up often, because most people were in it simply to look good. You don't get girlfriends with five arms, as Garrett had once put it. The illegal street grafters generally followed that principle too. They might be dirty, uncouth bastards, but at least they had the decency to know when to stop, for the good of the patient more than theirs. Besides, the criminal fraternity generally shunned any graft-surgeon seen to be willingly going over the limit with clients. They did have some honour.

A die-hard opposition member to any kind of change proposed, Garret viewed the issues of cyborgs and Body Grafters with practised and extremely well honed distaste.

The real issue here was the robbery though. A few weeks ago, and unregistered full borg had smashed down the front door, killed the staff in a frenzy, and made off with over thirty-thousand credits worth of parts and organs. Sold to a street dealer, there was no telling the chaos this could cause, not to mention the need to catch the cyborg for the multiple murders and damages she'd caused.

It wasn't the first time it had happened though. Over the past three months, there had been six body bank robberies. They appeared unconnected, but the same female modelled full borg had been spotted at all the crime scenes. She didn't always get involved, but she was always there somehow. She had become the PCPD's public enemy number one, but so far no one had come forward with any information regarding her or the thefts. The brave or foolhardy person that ratted on a full borg cybergang had better have some serious artillery ready when the gang came knocking at their door or, more appropriately, through their door.

Briar had long been aware of the PCPD's hushed secret. There was a confirmed illegal trade in organs behind the scenes of Princeps City's everyday facade. Not, of course, that an outside viewer wouldn't put a black market in body parts past Princeps City's everyday facade. It was a mess. Titania had never been the foremost priority in the fight for the restoration of the Lylat system.

After the war with Andross, there had been a civil war, and then the Cornerian government had pretty much left Titania to its own devices. Whereas Corneria had flourished into a planet of peace and prosperity, Titania had gone the other way.

Corneria was a planet of rolling hills, and agricultural complexes, with an excellent government, little crime and great living standards. Under the leadership of General Pepper's appointed interim government, the various city states and countries of Corneria had formed a plan to gradually put Corneria and then the rest of the Lylat system back on its feet after the huge efforts expended in the war. For most of the system it had worked. Corneria had reached and then surpassed its former glories, and the historians and social scientist of the Lylat system were calling the post-war years a golden age' of development and prosperity.

The other planets of the system were pulling ahead of their arduous troubles too. After the war devastated them, they had worked harder than ever to rebuild and reconstruct their societies. Under the guidance of Corneria, first Katina and then Fortuna had bloomed, casting off the difficulties that Andross had imposed upon them with his invasion, and had become almost as powerful as Corneria.

Katina was now the system's biggest industrial producer after MacBeth, and boasted arguably the best transport system in the system. It was home to the massive Alpha Port spaceport, which served as the main hub of most of the system's space traffic.

Fortuna had turned it's attentions to farming the open spaces on the surface of the planet, and had embarked on a massive terraforming scheme, transforming the planet from into an excellent agricultural world, and one that was used by the agri-corps all over the system as a base of operations.

This had continued in a fashion, until almost all the surviving Lylat system and been lifted from the ruins of the Andross war and placed back in line wit something akin to its former glory.

Titania, however, had chosen to go its own separate way with the proceedings. It had concentrated on its own industrial and corporate development, becoming, next to Corneria, the most powerful technical force in the entire system. Of course, this had had its price. Less money had been devoted to increasing the state of living for the actual inhabitants of the planet, and the money had gone into developing the rocketing industry levels. Titania's cities became massive sprawling slums, the likes of which were only seen on the planet Venom. Granted, Titania's living conditions were far and away superior to Venom's but that didn't stop it earning the insulting nickname of Venom 2.

Titanians didn't take kindly to this, but as a moniker, it wasn't so bad. There were far worse things out there.

And so, Titania's capital, Princeps City, had become the biggest and dirtiest city in Lylat, a massive megalopolis of over a billion inhabitants, full of cyborgs, drunks, drug dealers, prostitutes biker gangs, tech head hackers, anarchists, nihilists, terrorists, bureaucrats, politicians and power hungry corporate giants.

And in the middle of it all was Briar Politicus, Detective of the Princeps City Police Department.

Briar had been destined to be a police officer from birth. It was sort of a family tradition. There'd been a Politicus on the PCPD since before the first war. The name Politicus' just about capped it. Translated from ancient Cornerian, it literally meant belonging to the state or government'. At some point, one of Briar's relatives had decided that he'd make good his name, and serve the city. Briar cursed him daily, although he wasn't actually entirely sure of the man's first name. It was the principal that mattered.

Briar sat baecently, just to deal with the new increases in crime. Not to mention the new types of crime springing up. You had to hand it to them, criminals were ingenious. Just when you think you've stamped out one type of crime for good, a new one turns up. Recently, the PCPD had had to double the size of its electronic crime department. The Vice squads and Narcotics units were being overworked to the point of mental breakdowns among the administration level police officers in charge.

Also, the police had been forced to create a special anti-terrorist cyborg unit. Incidents with homicidal borgs were becoming increasingly more frequent, and now a number of full borg crimes were beginning to surface into the public eye alongside the usual ten-a-penny murder cases. The spread of these had to be stopped before something really serious happened.

Briar's mind rested on the issue of the body bank robberies. What could full borgs want with body parts anyway? It was the primary boast of a full borg that he had little to no organic matter left. Basically, the more metal the higher your mob respect.

So why were they after bodies? Surely they had no use for them themselves?

Briar's brow furrowed as he thought. Garrett appeared to notice his expression, and spoke. Briar was lifted fromThe PCPD was founding a lot of new divisions recently, just to deal with the new increases in crime. Not to mention the new types of crime springing up. You had to hand it to them, criminals were ingenious. Just when you think you've stamped out one type of crime for good, a new one turns up. Recently, the PCPD had had to double the size of its electronic crime department. The Vice squads and Narcotics units were being overworked to the point of mental breakdowns among the administration level police officers in charge.

Also, the police had been forced to create a special anti-terrorist cyborg unit. Incidents with homicidal borgs were becoming increasingly more frequent, and now a number of full borg crimes were beginning to surface into the public eye alongside the usual ten-a-penny murder cases. The spread of these had to be stopped before something really serious happened.

Briar's mind rested on the issue of the body bank robberies. What could full borgs want with body parts anyway? It was the primary boast of a full borg that he had little to no organic matter left. Basically, the more metal the higher your mob respect.

So why were they after bodies? Surely they had no use for them themselves?

Briar's brow furrowed as he thought. Garrett appeared to notice his expression, and spoke. Briar was lifted from the mental fug of deep cogitation by Garrett's less-than dulcet tones.

"We're not going to insert you straight into the gang," He said. Briar didn't show it, but he was immensely relieved, "Rather, we're going to put you in touch with one of Immanis' main informants, Snide."

Briar didn't feel too good about this one. Immanis was one of the city's, nay, the planet's most violent and dangerous criminals. An ex-military combat borg, he held the dubious honour of being gang leader of the Full Chrome mob. Full Chrome was a street organisation for full borgs, and arguable the most dangerous neutral crime gang in the whole city, not least because all of its members weighed upwards of five hundred kilos and had the brawling power and durability of exo-armour suits. They resembled a massive squad of huge walking tanks. Full Chrome only had around fifty members, less than a tenth of some of the bigger gangs, but as a single assembled fighting force, they were nothing short of terrifying. On one occasion, they had taken part in the riots following anti-cyborg protests down near City Hall. They had destroyed three whole blocks and killed 230 people between them by the time the police shot dead the leader and arrested the ringleaders.

And now, Briar was going in to hook up with Immanis' best friend and most trusted informant, Snide. Snide was well known in underworld circles, and a feared man. Even the Mafia families wouldn't touch him, even if that were only really for the sake of keeping their business deals with Full Chrome nice and sweet.

This is going to be one hell of a fucking assignment, Briar thought.


End file.
